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Tuesday, December 9, 2003

You read it here first, for free

New York Times columnist and Oregon homeboy Nicholas Kristof warned on Saturday (in a column reprinted in The Oregonian today, but forget trying to find that online) that Howard Dean, though perhaps being right-on on the issues, is not electable. You could have saved yourself a dollar (or 35 cents for the days-old Oregonian reprint) by just listening to me, weeks ago, when I said the same thing.

In today's Times, columnist David Brooks rags on Dean for flipflopping on many issues, which Brooks says will make key centrist voters very suspicious. "On the Internet, everyone is loosely tethered, careless and free," Brooks wrote. "Dean is the Internet man, a string of exhilarating moments and daring accusations. The only problem is that us rural folk distrust people who reinvent themselves. Many of us rural folk are nervous about putting the power of the presidency in the hands of a man who could be anyone."

We're starting to sound a bit like a broken record here, but I'm glad to see that the nation's leading lefty paper is seeing the light. Everyone's entitled to my opinion.

Comments (1)

But that Kristoff column was an eyebrow-raiser--I'll give you that. (Even my favorite columnist is allowed to get some things wrong.) Fortunately, Nick seems to be an outlier. Even the august (cough cough) National Review yesterday hemmed and hawed about having to confront Dean. But here's the definitive word on Dean, from Meyerson in today's Post:

"The secret of Dean's success has been twofold. Alone among the serious Democratic candidates he understood that the party was shirking its obligation to oppose -- indeed, that the grass roots was furious at the failure of its leaders to realize this. Second, his campaign became the real Meetup for millions of Americans who'd had no place to go to affect politics in the age of Bush. Dean's edge is that his campaign has provided thousands of young Deaniacs with a dimension of meaning that their hitherto disaggregated lives may have lacked. No other candidate is within light-years of offering that."

Anyone who works "hiterto" into a sentence has to be speaking the truth.